Hello Gary,

You have an excellent point. Those folksy names can't be beat. Keep the
faith.

FYI, while you've been in Saudi Arabia, our friend, the rufous-sided
towhee, was not only renamed, but split into TWO species. The "Eastern
towhee" is one, while we in the West now have the "spotted towhee." I
know this because it is my favorite backyard bird, so I keep up on its
doings. We have at least one nesting pair every year. I pray my neighbor
won't ever clean up his scrubby brush patch, the one that adjoins my scrubby
brush patch. They seem to live and nest there.

Regards,

Laura Friend
Newcastle, Washington (it's west of Issaquah)
lcf at u.washington.edu



On Tue, 20 Mar 2001, Gary Bletsch wrote:

>
> March 20, 2001
>
> Dear Tweeters,
> I had been wondering how "they" had decided we should switch to the British
> "Long-tailed Duck," and now I hear--as I had suspected--that political
> correctness had reared its head.
> Well, at the not inconsequential risk of offending millions, I shall stick
> out my neck and proclaim that I prefer our original American name. I like
> old, one-word handles like Mallard, Sora, Rook, and Ruff; there are precious
> few of them left, and taxonomic revisions are steadily whittling them down.
> Some of the names biologists have come up with in the last few years would
> freeze a poet's blood. Perhaps the worst such neologism is "Pacific-slope
> Flycatcher." How uneuphonious can one get? It's enough to give William
> Jennings Bryan a tongue of lead.
> Another name that has apparently bit the dust is "Rufous-sided Towhee."
> Isn't it "Eastern Towhee" now? I always detected an endearing foppishness in
> the name of that bird, while names with geographical directions in them
> never have done much for me.
> I guess once in a while it's fun to say "Baldpate" or "Pigeon Hawk," and
> now my Oldsquaw is fast becoming one of those quaint old names used by
> show-offs and the infirm. It wouldn't be so hard on us lovers of good names,
> though, if the biologists would just learn to put the same effort into
> coining timeless names, as into their quest for knowledge.
>
> Yours curmudgeonly,
> Gary Bletsch
> Yanbu, Saudi Arabia
>
>
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